Touch Capabilities in Consumer Portable Still Healthy

By AppleInsider Staff (AppleInsider@AppleInsider.com)
February 15, 1999

Many moons ago, when the details for the Consumer Portable were just sketches on the drawing board, we reported that Apple had been experimenting with touch capabilities on prototypes of the consumer unit. Rumors included everything from handwriting recognition to the ability of the portable to flip its display module 360 degrees to form a draw-on-screen tablet mode.

Don't Dig the Grave Just Yet

Since these initial reports, information became extremely limited. Apple went through a phase where Steve told everyone to "shut up or else..." Nothing concrete ever surfaced and later reports revealed their share, but never mentioned the rumored touch capabilities. And so we listed these features accordingly on our Hardware Archive. From there it wasn't long before we started hearing about the touch capabilities in Consumer Portable, once again.

According to sources with apparent contacts in Cupertino, Apple is still working on touch-scree/handwriting recognition for the Consumer Portable, and hopes to include it in the final version. There has been a lot of experimenting with touch capabilities and tablet environments at Apple, both in the past and present. They are no stranger to Apple. In fact, reports filed shortly after Macworld San Francisco suggest that Apple may be looking into touch capabilities as part of the future for both home and mobil computing, but more on that some other time.

It Aint Done Sir -- But We're Working On It

While reliable sources note that casing designs and logicboard revs for the Consumer Portable have surfaced, recent reports suggest that both are still under development at Apple, especially the casings. Additional reports also do much to confirm that the Consumer Portable will be announced in May of this year at either an Apple Media Event just prior to the WWDC, or at the Developers Conference its self. There will be a preparation period, as there was with the iMac, and the units are expected to be shipping by August's Macworld in New York City.

Why New York? Well, "they got better bagels in New York."

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